Kushner sat down with Gold Derby for an interview about the writing process. He addressed the absence of homosexual undertones in the film, despite his personal belief that there is reason to speculate Lincoln might have been gay or bisexual.

"I wanted to write about a very specific moment and I chose this moment and I don’t feel that there’s any evidence at this particular moment that Lincoln was having sex with anybody," Kushner said in the interview. "He seems to have not slept and taken no time off and during this period I think he was beginning to feel ground to a pulp by the war and by the pressures of his job. I find it difficult to believe that Lincoln was banging anybody."

Then there was the former president's relationship with his bodyguard, Captain David Derickson, with whom he also occasionally shared a bed, according to Gold Derby.

Lincoln once answered a knock at his bedroom door while wearing Derickson's nightshirt as the captain slumbered in his sack. Gossipmeisters buzzed about them. The wife of a navy aide wrote, "Oh, there is a Bucktail soldier here devoted to the president, drives with him, and when Mrs. L is not home, sleeps with him. What stuff!"

The main problem for Kushner, as it has been for Lincoln's past historians and biographers, is a serious lack of solid evidence showing these hints and relationships ever moved out of the realm of speculation and rumor and became sexually intimate.

"I absolutely believe that the Lincoln’s marriage was a real marriage. These two people loved each other," Kushner said. "It wouldn’t be the first time that a gay man and a straight woman hooked up and had a great marriage. But I don’t know. I really don’t know. And I think that’s what we have to say about it. We keep the door open and people should talk about it. I don’t feel, finally, that my politics are entirely determined by the fact that I’m a gay man.”

Well, tough stuff, for sure. Now, I might be wrong about this, but I don't remember the people of S. Carolina, or any of the other states, being allowed to "vote" on whether they wanted to secede from the union.

The Carolinians asked the federals to leave. They viewed them as an occupying force. Lincoln should have withdrawn. Why was the fort there in the first place? To protect the port from foreign invaders, not to protect the fort from Carolinians. Had Lincoln any diplomatic and political skills, he would have asked Carolina to man the fort at their own expense and sent them a thank you letter.

Lincoln was a miserable bastard, married to a shrew, a closet bisexual with all the baggage that went with that in the 18th century. Maybe, he had to show how tough he was. Maybe it gave him the thrill that he had as a young man wrestling with other young men slathering in sweat and testosterone. Perhaps if he could have played with the Village People, he wouldn’t have had to kill several hundred thousand other young men.

My wife is a big reader of things Lincoln. I believe she said they (Speed and Lincoln) were riding circuit together. Hotel space was limited in those days, the practice common. She doesn't buy into it.

And really so what if he was a little lavender.

Something truly great happened during those years. One group fought to free another group from slavery. It's not like Lincoln did this by himself. The leading anti-slavery folks were at fever pitch.

Ole Abe was a depressive suicidal demented man, maybe taking it up the ass was a good thing at the time. His wife was a schizophrenic who didn't know any better. Do you think she had any influence on his decision making? Hm....

Well, I guess I just find it hard to believe Abe was demented as he was able to stand up there and debate Douglas out in the open for six hours at a stretch.

but how do you think he was treated back then. I wonder.

Medically, I don't know. My wife might. Maybe they had him chewing cocaine. That was a big deal back then. Other than that, treated pretty well, overall, except by the guy that shot him. He did win two open free elections. Excluding 'the southern vote' of course.

Paul spoke about slavery directly, on occasion. When Jesus did, which was rare, it was in parable form, as far as I can recall. I recall him healing the slave of some Centurion, can you imagine that, the slave of a Centurion in Roman occupied Israel.

And Iesus said vnto him, Why callest thou mee good? None is good saue one, that is God.

Look, society wasn't his primary concern. His primary concern was sharing his experience, which was one of seeing things as made out of love, against nearly all expectations and much experience. He used images, relationships, common happenings, nature etc from everyday life around him to try to do this.

....

The Hero leaves his everyday hut, and moves to a realm of supernatural wonder.

Ole Abe was a depressive suicidal demented man, maybe taking it up the ass was a good thing at the time. His wife was a schizophrenic who didn't know any better. Do you think she had any influence on his decision making? Hm....

I find it amazing, here we are talking about a truly transcendent political event in the most stupid, sordid, disgusting terms.

600,000 Americans killed, who knows how many wounded, the country thrown into a depression, because of the ineptness of politicians is stupid, sordid and disgusting in the extreme. Pipes, whistles, banners and pretty words is some small salve. All to the glory of god and the republic. Insanity.

I would have preferred to see them live a full life, the only one they will ever have had, to see the rewards of a good life, instead of ending as fly shit and that my friends is stupidity. Hail to the dunces of the world.

I would have preferred to see them live a full life, the only one they will ever have had, to see the rewards of a good life, instead of ending as fly shit and that my friends is stupidity. Hail to the dunces of the world.

Yes, the slaves should have had a full life, instead of worked to death, and turned into fly shit. We can all agree with that.

Dammit, how do I get that number out of there. It designates my picture number. I was sending pictures to Mat, and was getting ready to send Antoine Roquentin's Root, taken up a slough from the Kentucky River on our trip of recent memory.

Despite such terminology as "fiscal cliff" and "debt ceiling," the great debate taking place in Washington now has relatively little to do with financial issues. It is all about ideology. It is all about economic winners and losers in American society. It is all about the power of Big Money. It is all about the soul of America.

In America today, we have the most unequal distribution of wealth and income of any major country on earth, and more inequality than at any time period since 1928. The top 1 percent owns 42 percent of the financial wealth of the nation, while, incredibly, the bottom 60 percent own only 2.3 percent. One family, the Walton family of Wal-Mart, owns more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of Americans. In terms of income distribution in 2010, the last study done on this issue, the top 1 percent earned 93 percent of all new income while the bottom 99 percent shared the remaining 7 percent.

Despite the reality that the rich are becoming much richer while the middle class collapses and the number of Americans living in poverty is at an all-time high, the Republicans and their billionaire backers want more, more, and more. The class warfare continues.

My Republican colleagues say that the deficits are a spending problem, not a revenue problem. What these deficit-hawk hypocrites won't talk about is their spending. They won't discuss what they did to dig the country into this $1 trillion deep deficit hole. They waged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq without paying for them. They gave away huge tax breaks for the rich. They squandered taxpayer dollars on the pharmaceutical industry by making it illegal to let Medicare bargain for lower drug prices. They also rescinded financial regulations that enabled Wall Street to operate like a gambling casino, leading to a severe recession that eroded tax revenue and left more than 14 percent of American workers unemployed or underemployed.

Now, despite the deficits their policies helped to create and despite the enormous suffering which exists in our society, the Republicans want to cut Social Security, veterans' programs, Medicare, Medicaid, education, nutrition programs, and virtually every program which benefits low- and moderate-income Americans. They choose to turn their backs on the economic reality facing a significant part of our population: high unemployment, reduced wages, 50 million without health insurance, college graduates saddled with enormous student debt and elderly people living in desperation. And they have tried to slam the door on any further discussion about how to raise revenue by ending tax loopholes and unfair tax breaks.

Republicans like Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell who say the revenue debate is over don't want you to consider these facts:

• Federal revenue today, at 15.8 percent of GDP, is lower today than it was 60 years ago. During the last year of the Clinton administration, when we had a significant federal surplus, federal revenue was 20.6 percent of GDP.

• Today corporate profits are at an all-time high, while corporate income tax revenue as a percentage of GDP is near a record low.

• In 2011, corporate revenue as a percentage of GDP was just 1.2 percent -- lower than any other major country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, including Britain, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, Norway, Australia, South Korea, Switzerland, Norway, Italy, Ireland, Poland, and Iceland.

• In 2011, corporations paid just 12 percent of their profits in taxes, the lowest since 1972.

• In 2005, one out of four large corporations paid no income taxes at all while they collected $1.1 trillion in revenue over that one-year period.

We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President . . . . .

Politicians all claim that economic growth is necessary and the only way to close widening and structural deficits.

In order to restore GDP growth, which is needed to bring down public and private debt ratios, politicians will decide that fiscal policy must shift in an expansionary direction. If higher budget deficits are financed by bond sales to the private sector, there will be problems with higher interest rates and public confidence may be eroded by rising public debt ratios.

Therefore politicians will “order” the central bank to expand the monetary base to finance the budget deficits. This will hold down the public debt ratio, and if it causes inflation to rise, that might be a welcome side effect. Any other way of solving the debt crisis, it is argued, would be politically and economically more painful, so politicians and their electorates will inevitably follow the path of least resistance.

Either way, the rich get richer and that ensures the vast underbelly does not.

Shanghai, China - This country's economic boom has lifted millions of its citizens out of poverty and led to predictions it will become the world’s largest economic power by 2030. However, while China's GDP has increased, so has the gap between its wealthiest and poorest citizens, placing the country among the most unequal nations in the world, according to a study by a Chinese institute.

China's Gini coefficient, a widely accepted measure of income distribution, reached 0.61 in 2010, according to findings by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance. A score of zero represents perfect equality while a score of one represents total inequality, with one individual possessing 100 percent of a country's income.

Inequality is starkly visible in large cities such as Shanghai, where Lamborghinis and Porsches are a regular sight outside expensive restaurants, while beggars sit on the pavement with plastic cups looking for change. In the shadow of looming skyscrapers lie cramped dormitories for migrant labourers who work on some of the world’s most expensive properties.

The Chinese government has not released official Gini coefficient figures since 2000, when they put the figure at 0.412. In 2012, the National Bureau of Statistics said it was "slightly higher than 0.412" in 2010, but didn't give an exact figure, reported Xinhua, the Chinese state news agency. In March, Bo Xilai, the now ousted former Communist Party secretary of Chongqing, said that the figure had exceeded 0.46.

The World Bank, in a report published in February, cited income inequality as one of the main challenges facing China. The report stated that "the sustained increase in income inequality places China at the high end of income inequality among Asian countries". The World Bank hasn't issued Gini coefficient figures for China since 2005, when it estimated it to be 0.425.

Chinese estimates of the country's Gini coefficient have varied considerably. For example, in September, the International Institute for Urban Development in Beijing calculated China's Gini coefficient to be 0.438 in 2010, much lower than the Survey and Research Centre's result. Professor Gan Li, the centre's director, said he could not explain the differing figures but added that their study, which surveyed 8,400 households, was the first to publicly release all its data.

In an interview with the Communist Party-owned Global Times newspaper, Zheng Xinye, a professor at Renmin University, said the real figure may be even higher than 0.61 - as it is difficult to survey the super-rich in China. He blamed the widening income gap on "restrictions that kept small and medium-sized companies from entering high-profit sectors, as well as by employment discrimination".

However, Professor Martin Whyte, a sociologist at Harvard University who has carried out research on attitudes towards inequality in China, said he found the figure of 0.61 hard to believe. “T/he best survey research on income gaps leads to the same conclusion that the figure [Gini coefficient] is rising but is nowhere near these sort of figures,” he said.

WASHINGTON -- In the wake of news that both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve rejected the minting of a trillion dollar coin as a solution to help raise the debt ceiling, the White House issued the following statement to The Huffington Post.

"There are only two options to deal with the debt limit: Congress can pay its bills or they can fail to act and put the nation into default," said Press Secretary Jay Carney. "When Congressional Republicans played politics with this issue last time putting us at the edge of default, it was a blow to our economic recovery, causing our nation to be downgraded. The President and the American people won't tolerate Congressional Republicans holding the American economy hostage again simply so they can force disastrous cuts to Medicare and other programs the middle class depend on while protecting the wealthy. Congress needs to do its job."

If there were any lingering doubts about how the Obama administration will handle the debt-ceiling issue, Saturday's pronouncements put them to rest. Moments before Carney offered his statement, Treasury spokesman Anthony Coley offered one of his own, declaring that "neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit."

And so, there will be no coin minted to assist Treasury with its efforts to help the country meet its financial obligations. The politics of the debt ceiling standoff are now . . . .

We know where the Republicans are coming from. What about the Democrats? Will President . . . . .

I'm afraid the answer is no Bernie, he won't.

I like Bernie Sanders and most of what he points out in his article is true. The problem is that like most on the left he doesn't recognize how deep a hole we are in and the reasons for it. He doesn't recognize how we got in this hole or the people that got us there. He blames the whole fiasco on the GOP without recognizing the part the Dems played.

Will the President, in Rufus' words, give them hell? The answer is no.

Everyone seems to think that Obama won on the fiscal cliff deal because he held out and forced the GOP to up taxes on the rich. The White House was ecstatic. But what did they actually get?

He got about $66 billion a year for 10 years. He gave back about $67 billion a year for ten years by forcing back into the deal the very tax breaks Sanders is blaming on the GOP. However, Obama did get about $115 billion a year from the middle class by letting the FICA tax cuts expire.

So, in net, what did Obama accomplish. He got his $66 billion a year from the rich then gave back $67 billion to those same rich netting out to zero. So all the celebrating is over the $115 billion he took from the middle class.

Bad enough, but the worse is that now the GOP say they have done their part. They gave at the office. Both Boehner and McConnell have stated that the tax cuts are over and won't be on the table in this next round. They are both so pissed off at Obama and Reid right now that I tend to believe them.

Sorry Bernie, your a nice guy but it's time for some reality and a couple important lessons.

1. We are not going to get out of this mess without both spending cuts and taxes increases.

2. The people you are dealing with on both sides of the aisle are all dicks and they serve many of the same masters.

In the previous post, I pointed out that in order to get out of the previous mess we had to have both tax hikes and spending cuts.

Of course there is another question, or two.

1. Do we really want to get out of this mess? Polls indicate of course, as long as we don't have to pay more taxes or give up any of the benefits we currently enjoy. But this is, of course, impossible.

2. What would increasing taxes or cutting services actually buy us? I contend that it likely would buy us nothing. The dicks in D.C would merely go out an accumulate more debt, debt that the nation would be responsible for yet the benefits of which would go to the usual suspects. So the next question becomes,

3. Should we even worry about our debt or continue on as we are right now and in the end monetize our debt till we reach the point that doing so is no longer an option. Why should the public worry about the debt. Let the people that are benefitting from it worry for a while.

Initially, I blamed everything on Bush. After the first year or two I started blaming it on Obama and Bush. I now blame it on everyone involved including, the FED, the Treasury, the SEC, the banks, Wall Street, everyone involved in the fiasco. It takes books to describe every aspect of this continuing clusterfick. However, the link I posted to the Rolling Stones article on the bailout by Matt Taibbi is one of the best I've seen at pointing out the lies and corruption that have been foisted on us by the boys in D.C.

It's about 5 pages long so I'm not sure if anyone bothered to read it but I plan on pulling excerpts from it and posting them over the next couple of days. Unfortunately, some of the charts that were in the magazine article weren't included in the online version.

Here's one, and a reason we need regular audits of the FED

The bailout ended up being much bigger than anyone expected, expanded far beyond TARP to include more obscure (and in some cases far larger) programs with names like TALF, TAF, PPIP and TLGP. What's more, some parts of the bailout were designed to extend far into the future. Companies like AIG, GM and Citigroup, for instance, were given tens of billions of deferred tax assets – allowing them to carry losses from 2008 forward to offset future profits and keep future tax bills down. Official estimates of the bailout's costs do not include such ongoing giveaways. "This is stuff that's never going to appear on any report," says Barofsky.

Citigroup, all by itself, boasts more than $50 billion in deferred tax credits – which is how the firm managed to pay less in taxes in 2011 (it actually received a $144 million credit) than it paid in compensation that year to its since-ousted dingbat CEO, Vikram Pandit (who pocketed $14.9 million). The bailout, in short, enabled the very banks and financial institutions that cratered the global economy to write off the losses from their toxic deals for years to come – further depriving the government of much-needed tax revenues it could have used to help homeowners and small businesses who were screwed over by the banks in the first place.

Even worse, the $700 billion in TARP loans ended up being dwarfed by more than $7.7 trillion in secret emergency lending that the Fed awarded to Wall Street – loans that were only disclosed to the public after Congress forced an extraordinary one-time audit of the Federal Reserve. The extent of this "secret bailout" didn't come out until November 2011, when Bloomberg Markets, which went to court to win the right to publish the data, detailed how the country's biggest firms secretly received trillions in near-free money throughout the crisis.

Have you been getting free medical care from the VA, or do you have to pay something for it, Rufus. Just curious as to how it works, as my friend is basically broke, and has been for as long as I've known him. And I wondered about it.

Antoine, it's complicated. I got "grand-fathered" in on some stuff (cost-wise.) I had used it for a minor operation years ago when I was self-employed, and found out I could get it done for free.

I still get free medical visits, and some tests (although I think Medicare Part B picks up most of it. I started back for the Drug Co-Pay, but now that's not much, if any, better than Medicare Part D.

All I can tell you is have him go down and talk to them. That doesn't cost anything; and the ones I've dealt with have been very nice people.

They do take income into consideration, but all they did with me was ask, "how much do you earn?" (btw, thanks for reminding me, I need to talk to them again. My earnings aren't ezzackly what they were when I started; maybe I can get my co-pays down a bit.) :)

But, really, he should check it out. All I remember needing was a DD-214, and they helped me send away for that. They have some pretty good Doctors (and a few dingbats,) and are pretty nice people.

I got turned back onto the VA this time around when my Doctor put me on Crestor, and my brother (who has enough money to burn a TEAM of Wet Mules) told me he was getting his drugs through VA, and getting a Co-Pay.

I was leery because a lot of the older hospitals were dumps, but I was very pleasantly surprised to find that the hospitals, today, are very clean, and pleasant.

Magnificent Ronald and the Founding Fathers of al Qaeda

“These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America’s founding fathers.” — Ronald Reagan while introducing the Mujahideen leaders to media on the White house lawns (1985). During Reagan’s 8 years in power, the CIA secretly sent billions of dollars of military aid to the mujahedeen in Afghanistan in a US-supported jihad against the Soviet Union. We repeated the insanity with ISIS against Syria.